TC Transcontinental gained complete control over its flexible packaging operations with the EFI Enterprise Packaging Suite.
Founded in 1976, TC Transcontinental has grown steadily over the years to become the largest printer in Canada and the third largest in North America. It has operations in print and digital media, flexible packaging and publishing. The company’s Packaging Division is focused on manufacturing excellence, meeting the highest food safety standards, comprehensive quality programs, technical expertise, quick turnaround and a dedication to customer service.
Drawing on its solid manufacturing experience, TC Transcontinental created a new division in 2014, TC Transcontinental Packaging, which specialises in the production of flexible packaging. As the spearhead for this new area of growth, TC Transcontinental acquired Capri Packaging, a U.S.-based business in Clinton, Mo., offering a wide range of flexible film structures and packaging solutions mainly for food products including pouches, overwrap bags, wrapping, lidding, re-closable and sealable packaging and rollstock.
Challenge
Flexible packaging converter TC Transcontinental Packaging has built its reputation on three cornerstones: food safety, consistent quality and outstanding customer service. Part of the company’s commitment to service is based on its short-run capabilities, quick turnaround and flexible scheduling. With new equipment and a dedicated and knowledgeable workforce, the converting operation – a growth-driven division of print and publishing giant TC Transcontinental – delivers quality flexible printing and laminating solutions using 10-color flexographic printing plus industry-leading food safety systems supported by stringent process controls and traceability.
When TC Transcontinental established its packaging division with the purchase of Clinton, Mo.-based Capri Packaging in 2014, company executives recognised that an upgrade of its existing management information system (MIS) was in order to be able to profitably grow its packaging business. The facility had used EFI PSI software, but would now require an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would be compatible with TC Transcontinental’s corporate ERP and PeopleSoft financial software platforms.
Jason Schmedding, team advisor of the division’s scheduling group, notes that switching to a new ERP could not create any process changes that would jeopardise the company’s Safe Quality Food 3 (SQF3) certification.
‘Our facilities are SQF3 certified, which is critical for our customers,’ noted Mr Schmedding. ‘To maintain that, we have to keep up with FDA regulations for supply-chain inventory control. So that was an absolute requirement for all the ERP systems we looked at.’
Solution
‘After an RFQ review, we viewed demos of a few systems and picked EFI Radius,’ said Ian Bruson, Manufacturing Efficiency team lead for TC Transcontinental Packaging. As the core component of EFI’s Enterprise Packaging Suite, Radius ERP will allow TC Transcontinental to take advantage of the Suite’s certified, end-to-end business and production workflow for flexible packaging. The workflow brings with it additional components with coinciding release dates and certified out-of-the-box integrations. TC Transcontinental’s Suite workflow will contain additional components with job submission, scheduling, estimating, shop-floor data collection, shipping and fulfillment capabilities.
Like other package converting organizations that are divisions of a much larger enterprise, TC Transcontinental preferred to take advantage of the Suite’s data exporting capabilities to connect its packaging Suite with its existing corporate accounting system.
Download the entire case study here.
This article is an advertorial; the featured company created the wording and paid for its placement. It has been thoroughly checked by Whitmar Publications to ensure that the information is accurate and meets our standards.
